Olivia Laing and Chiara Valerio. Chiara Valerio and Olivia Laing. The back and forth is sizzling. “I came prepared” warns Valerio after her first question. Olivia Laing often accompanies Valerio’s quips with loud laughter. More than once Valerio nods reverentially at Laing’s expressive capacity, which feels condensed and expansive both at once. “I love Chiara for she understands me better than I understand myself!”.

The two will soon share a warm hug. Make no mistake, Valerio interrogates Laing with forensic tenacity. “Anti-British” in eschewing domestic narratives of the upper class, a staple of English novels, Olivia Laing is still a “reader first, reader truly”, and owes much to English writers. Laing enrols gleefully in the singular tradition of Virigina Woolf. Woolf’s language “could capture the provisional nature of everyday life”. Hers was “an almost impossible task” that feels even more urgent at a time - then and now, it seems - when “great holes are opening up in reality”.

At the start of The Garden Against Time, just released in Italian by Einaudi, Milton’s Paradise Lost takes over Woolf. What follows is a book that, much like Laing’s other work, weaves together those “long movements that connect strangers through time”. A tapestry of biographies, from John Clare to William Morris, is held together by the titular thematic centre, “the dream of the garden”.

Inspired by their own restoration of a garden in Suffolk as the pandemic raged, Laing’s narrative is only occasionally doused in sentimentality and sensory overload. Laing maintains some ambivalence towards their journey from environmental activism to owning a garden. It is difficult to resist to the garden and its charms, though. At its most existential, cultivating the garden is not trivial. It holds the power to redefine our conception of time from linear to circular, following the cycles of every plant and flower. The garden “as clock” can move us to accept death even.

At its most political, the garden can be “a good or a bad dream”. From England’s enclosures to colonial plantations, foregrounding the “bad dream” is key to Laing’s cry for a common paradise. In Mantova’s Piazza Castello, they draw on recent news to update this critique. Even in modern-day Italy, we are reminded, gardens – here meaning the fields behind the country’s renowned food industry – can be the theatre of “forced labour, overwork, death”. Horror and the “gothic” are integral to the garden’s troubled history and to Laing’s activism and production ever since the AIDS crisis.

Like the wartime sanctuary Laing describes in closing their chronicle, we should all be complicit in dreaming otherwise. “Build a better garden”.